Likelihood to Recommend I am going to speak of a personal experience- on multiple occasions: I need my husband to sign documents during the day and I don't need him here- physically. He sometimes works in different parts of the state as well at his own company. There is no problem at all, as long as he has access to his cell phone, email, and cell phone service- he can sign the documents I need him to. It is AMAZING- I can't speak highly enough of Docusign.
Read full review XaitPorter is ideal when a large document, containing many (preferably independent) sections is being created by more than five writers across different office locations and is subject to review by multiple reviewers and requires formal approval. It is particularly suited for external documents which are to be delivered as a non-editable PDF file.
Read full review Pros Ease of sending the same document out to multiple recipients, at multiple locations, for multiple signatures Quick turnaround - once the recipient signs the document, we receive notification and the document back immediately Can resend, alter, change, and/or add to the email and/or document that is sent out very easily The recipient can save the document after signing, so they too have their own electronic copy for their records Read full review This tool gives us the opportunity to work together. We always work in the last revision. We can write comments as we go along and all involved will see it straight away. We can structure it the way we want/our the way customer wants it and print the whole book in one go. We are sure that pictures/text/tables are where they are supposed to be (they have not moved around the document as it does when using Microsoft Word). Read full review Cons Tracking, particularly when collecting signatures through connected applications, such as an ATS, is not always clean or easily traceable. Formatting documents to handle electronic signature types (signatures, initials, etc.) is not always easy, and highly dependent on the partner's technology. It is not convenient to have to use DocuSign as a stand alone product if the signatures are required for 3rd party applications. It definitely excels on its own, but the scope of that usage, at least for us, is slim. Read full review It would be helpful to improve functions used to organize and reorganize sections. They work fine, but could be retooled for ease of use. Simple drag-drop over the tree-view from the primary navigator (not only in the dedicated dialog for reordering sections) would be very good. It would be good to support simple flagging or tagging of sections to indicate whatever is meaningful to the user (e.g., to flag a section as imported text that needs formatting, or a section that is high priority for review). The icons do change to indicate predefined workflow states (e.g. approved), but there isn't support for a user-defined tag, perhaps with the ability to filter by tag as many newer applications can do. That would be handy. These aren't criticisms so much as product enhancement suggestions. The editor is ok but could be tuned up a bit. For example, styles in the toolbar dropdown apply only to the whole paragraph. It's hard to indent text. The button tool doesn't consistently remove the button attribute on an existing button; works sometimes, sometimes not. Little stuff. Overall it's adequate for text creation. The process of defining templates and styles appears to be a black art. While it's something you don't do often, it should be simplified and better exposed to ordinary admins. The ability to have more than one section open at a time in the editor would be fantastic. Great productivity tool. Word import/export could be cleaner. The ability to export to html with user-defined style sheets would open new markets for Xait. If the product had that, we'd use Xait to maintain our online help site too. The ability to link to externally stored images rather than lock them inside the Xait library would be huge, as we've expressed to the support team. We manage hundreds of images (diagrams, screen shots etc.) that are used throughout the company, not just for Xait documents. We would like to store them on a file system (e.g. Dropbox) and have them update into Xait automatically when the master copy is modified. This is a very important capability, though in fairness we didn't find it in other products either. Explicit support for Dropbox/Google Drive/Box would be one way, but dynamic linking a la Microsoft Word would be fine, maybe even better. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I can't imagine doing business without DocuSign now. I would never want to go back to the way we used to do things. The "new way" is "the way" is "the right way." We can honestly be proud of a "one right way" process and not have to suffer through "5 ways for 5 days."
Read full review There are too many positive aspects versus negative.
Read full review Usability Generally user-friendly once you have command of the basics, but also has a lot of nuances that can make it difficult to train others on. DocuSign University is a helpful tool, but understandably a lot of content to get through to become a well-versed user. A lot of different functionalities but only a few I use on a weekly basis.
Read full review We find it to be intuitive to use with a simple menu and right-click based functionality in place.
Read full review Reliability and Availability It does not go down. I have had zero issues with DocuSign, approaching 4 years.
Read full review XaitPorter is always there even though we have issues with outages (suddenly the network does not work, but that is internal issue)
Read full review Performance Everything loads quickly. Reports are generated in a reasonable time. No noticeable difference in integrated software processing speeds.
Read full review Our reports/Tenders complete in a reasonable time frame, actually faster than Word. We have not integrated with other systems or softwares.
Read full review Support Rating I'd give them a 10, but there has been 1 or 2 small cases that seemed to fall to the wayside, but I was able to call them up and get them resolved. We were having a bad implementation night (after midnight) and we needed assistance from Docusign. They were able to get an engineer to help us in the early morning hours
Read full review They have a clear method for reporting any issues and work hard to get a resolution, keeping me informed of progress.
Read full review In-Person Training He was really good. He came from Xait and trained us for several days. He got all involved and answered the questions asked. He was a professional trainee
Read full review Online Training Docusign is super easy to use, and apart from a few administration details, there was really nothing to train on. Post implementation, there were issues with configuration of auto-filled documents with the integrating 3rd party. That training required some time, because the DocuSign expert took the time to walk me through the 3rd party's configuration (how often does that happen?) so I could see how DocuSign should be best used to overcome weaknesses in the 3rd party platform. 10/10 expert care.
Read full review The online training was really good. They know the way of getting people involved and they answered all questions asked. They were there for us.
Read full review Implementation Rating Until you get the hang of it, I recommend doing several internal tests before sending a document to a client. As I mentioned earlier, you have to go through a bit of trial and error at first to verify that the workflow works as expected.
Read full review I was really satisfied with the implementation
Read full review Alternatives Considered I would say that DocuSign's biggest competitor and a most similar product is
Adobe Sign . They both offer almost identical features with Adobe offering a slightly better interface.
Adobe Sign is also less costly than DocuSign while offering templates that can be useful for various activities. If you are looking for more branding options then Adobe offers a slight advantage but for corporate control, I would say DocuSign offers more security.
Read full review The standard product for many years has been Microsoft Word. Some have tried to use SharePoint as a collaborative tool, but it is not suited for the purpose and is generally very user un-friendly. It is not intuitive and we have very few persons with any competency in it. Porter is easy to pick up and the new interface is very intuitive, and the way that Porter works removes many of the typical layout and formatting choices that made Microsoft Word so difficult for the average employee. It also greatly simplifies and reduces the amount of corrective work that tender support staff used to have to do. We are not aware of any product in the market that comes close to Porter. It is an ideal product that was purpose built for collaborative writing.
Read full review Scalability In my years of using DocuSign, I have never had an outage. I haven't even encountered a bug.
Read full review I just love the system
Read full review Return on Investment DocuSign has made fax machines obsolete for receiving, signing, and returning documents to multiple parties. DocuSign is a secure method of signing documents and that is a positive. Fax machines are generally not very secure. DocuSign stores your documents in an encrypted form which protects your privacy and the privacy of all parties named in a document. Read full review Too soon to tell. Right now we're still at the near end of the value chain - it still seems expensive given the outputs to date. But we have a lower proposal volume than some companies, so you need to factor that in. Also, the named user licensing is restrictive and problematic in a small company where people perform multiple roles and may dip in and out of the proposal development process over a period of weeks or months. A concurrent user model would be much, much better for us, though I understand you'd need to figure out a way to handle email notifications. Read full review ScreenShots